Hector's Garden

Hector's Garden (1999) Post 261

Hector's Garden Sally Odgers

Hector's Garden is the story of Hector, a centaur statue buried in a Greek hillside for hundreds of years and dug up during a routine construction job. The young workman who finds his leg is intrigued, and gets his friend to help him find the other fragments. They take them to a professor who pieces them together. The young men think there are two statues, or maybe an incomplete one of a horseman, but eventually Hector is revealed as what he is. Hector attempts to converse with his restorers as he did with the mad who sculpted him, but no one can hear. From a museum to a store room. Hector finds life too quiet, so he gets off his plinth and finds his way into a garden populated with plaster statues. Eventually, Hector arrives back on his hillside where Yanis, the young man who found him and who is now a professor, is setting up a garden. Hector is full of stories, and every night he talks to the plaster statues, telling them, reminding them, of who they once were. Finally, one of them listens. Hector's Garden is one of my favourites of the readers from this period. It allowed me to indulge in my interest in Greek myth.

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Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. She runs http://www.affordablemanuscriptassessments.com and Prints Charming Books. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 is to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist. If you enjoyed a post, or want to ask about any of my books or my manuscript assessment service.